The Bodleian Library in Oxford has operated a similar underground system for many years, although I think they use minions rather than robots to find the books. I always found it a rather empty and disappointing experience to be so close to so many books, but to only handle the particular one I had requested.

The new library at EPFL in Switzerland is much better. They have a fancy building above ground, some of which houses books. But most of them are kept in stacks underground, so they're tightly packed but still accessible.

+1 for guided random searches (a.k.a. following the shelf where you found a good one).

It's fast. Not the calculation speed (it's horrible on my old calc), but the speed of typing stuff in. I have an old TI-60 that I've been using since school, and I use it daily. I can hammer out numbers quickly with one hand, while holding a 'scope probe, soldering iron, or whatever with the other. I have a calculator app on my phone (RealCalc) - it's handy when I'm not near a real calculator. But in the time it's taken you to start your calculator emulator, I've been around three or four iterations of capacitance/inductance/resonant frequency calculations.

Maybe he's being blocked because it's not his access point?

It's all nice and dandy that you want a bunch of high-end professional equipment, but what do you actually want to do with your lab? Analogue? Digital? RF? Do you want some mechanical capabilities (drilling boxes, etching/machining PCBs, CNC, 3D printing, etc)? Do you need a microscope for really small stuff?
Rather than getting all excited about the shiny new toys, start with what you want to do. Then figure out what you need/want to help you do this. That's a question we can help with.

I agree that hardware is hard. But radio hams have been building hardware, and sharing designs, for longer than software has existed. A large part of their success is about the mindset. A professional RF engineer will demand a certain set of instruments to make their job possible. A ham will either find a way to make the tests with cheaper equipment, or find a way to build the instrument first (see, for example, the various homebrew network analyser projects). Partly this means relaxing design specs to make a project more likely to work. Partly it means recognising that building one of something is different to building 10,000 - if your project takes time spent at the bench tweaking individual components, well, that's part of the game.

If you come from a professional background, open source hardware looks impossible. But if you add a little more ingenuity, and pick your projects carefully, it's entirely possible and can produce some very impressive projects.

It's a bit less secret now.

Because, you know, while the guys are designing the r2.0 board they're not putting r1.0 boards in boxes and licking stamps?

When we say Gnome sucks, we're talking relative to other open-source desktops. Gnome 3 annoyed me, so I'm now a happy XFCE user. At work I'm forced to use Windows 7. Now that really sucks. When Windows finally figures out how to delete/move a couple of thousand files in less than half an hour, then maybe we can start talking about a 'premium experience'.

God hates...

Think of a modern digital SLR versus an old pure-mechanical film version. The modern design is a pretty impressive balance between keeping the old layout for things you want to find quickly without looking (knobs, buttons, dials), and adding a load of new features that you don't need very often (menu based). Car UI designers would do well to learn from this approach.

What the Arduino crowd have done fantastically well is get a load of people who wouldn't normally mess with a microcontroller to do just that. The community is the strength. There are hundreds (thousands?) of microcontroller demo boards out there, but without the support network they're hard work to use. Not impossible, but development is slower, and restricted to users with more time/enthusiasm. As someone with no previous microcontroller experience you could buy an Arduino kit, unwrap it in the morning, and have something running before dinner. That's pretty incredible.

Until there is an alternative to Solidworks and CST Microwave Studio under Linux, I'm stuck here.As I'm forced to use Windows, and everybody around me uses MS Office, I might as well use it too. Sad but true.

The only application that runs painfully slowly on my Windows machine is Office 2010 (try Word with track changes enabled). The other stuff is actually quite snappy. Is this another case of MS modifying Windows to fix Office?

I have an Xperia Mini (i.e. no slide-out keyboard) and it's great. I held off buying a smartphone for years because most of them are just too big. The screen is a tiny bit smaller than an iphone, but there is less surround so the whole device is smaller. Now if Sony can just figure out how to make it half as thick while doubling the battery life, then I'll be really happy.

Oh dear, you really don't get it. For any technical writing, LaTeX is just better than those office suites. If you write you document in an office suite, and then move it to LaTeX, you miss out on most of the benefit. Equations are one (no, the equation editor in MS Word is not sufficient). Automatic numbering of anything (equations, figures, sections, references, molecules, whatever), and references to them, is another. Yes, I know various office suites can do this, but I never see users using the feature in practice - whereas every LaTeX user I've met uses them extensively.

I have met people who've written their PhD thesis using MS Word. They've all agreed, after the fact, that it wasn't a good plan.